South-South Emerging Relations And Cooperation: Southeast Asia And Latin America In Perspective

MARÍA FLORENCIA RUBIOLO

Bakú

Congreso; Baku World Science forum; 2014

East Asia has become, in the last fifteen years, a central region for Latin-America?s international commercial insertion. The approach is a consequence of forces on both sides. On the Latin American side, East Asia appears as a unique opportunity to diversify export destination markets and, as a result, to lessen dependency links towards traditional partners such as the United States and Western Europe. On the Eastern Asian side, Latin America also appears as an increasing and complementary ?excepting Mexico- export market and, also, as a natural-resource-rich provider. Among East Asia trading partners, the People?s Republic of China has been the one that concentrated main foreign policy efforts from Latin American countries, given its magnitude and the potential of its market. As a result, China became on the top three destination markets for countries such as Argentina, Brazil and Chile since 2003-2005 up to date, and also the one of the main origin country of its imports. The case of Mexico is different, since China has been a top exporter to the Mexican market since the beginning of the 21st century, but it was just since 2010 that Mexican exports could enhance its participation in the Chinese market . This is due to the trade relations structure: while Argentina, Brazil and Chile are natural-resource-export countries, and hence has a complementary trade relation with China; Mexico has concentrated on manufacture trade, and as a result is a less attractive import market for China. In recent years, there has been an increasing participation of other emerging East Asian economies in Latin America. Southeast Asian countries are becoming relevant trading partners for South American countries mainly. There is a growing potential for the developing of South-South cooperation schemes as trade relations deepen, generating a growing interdependent commercial pattern. This is particularly the case of Argentina and Indonesia , but there are other examples such as Brazil and Singapore. South-South cooperation emerged as an strategy for less developed countries during the seventies. It was a reaction to North-South relations, that were generating increasing dependency links, and deteriorating the international position and decision making participation of the countries from the developing world . In recent years, a combination of events ?the failure of the neoliberal developing formulas known as the Washington Consensus, the emergence of economies from the South as India, China and Brazil, and the 2008 economic crisis- generated the opportunity for a revival of the South-South cooperation ideas and objectives, but with a renewed agenda and strategy. Although historically, and contemporarily as well, Latin America-Southeast Asia relations have been based on trade exchanges almost exclusively , there are emerging South-South cooperation initiatives engaging countries of both regions. In this paper we aim to identify and analyze the initiatives that have taken place from a South-South perspective between South American and Southeast Asian countries from 2000 to date.